Oil companies earned a permanent enemy in me when they messed with the electric car the first time around, and I think they continue to do a disservice in making it seem like fossil fuels are cheaper than they really are in terms of total cost.

Chris Paine

Categorized in : Thinking Car Oil

Solar, for example - which has typically been thought of as so expensive - is cheap when compared with, for example, the cost of cleaning up the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Gulf.

nuclear cost example

I think electric cars can help save Detroit. They reflect good decision-making, and there has been bad decision making in the auto industry for so long, in my view.

views long thinking

Resistance to change is always the biggest obstacle. by Chris Paine

Resistance to change is always the biggest obstacle.

obstacles resistance-to-change resistance

There are not a ton of people buying cars - cars are expensive. So people usually go for the cheapest car they can get. And if the price of gasoline falls again, it makes the savings that you get with an electric car harder to realize.

car people fall

I think China is set up to surpass the US on the even more critic... by Chris Paine

I think China is set up to surpass the US on the even more critical industry of green power.

china green thinking

In the case of all the carmakers, there's a certain amount of greenwash. Take Toyota: They were pushing the Prius while they were meanwhile marketing the hell out of the Sequoia and other models with terrible gas mileage.

hell pushing marketing

What oil companies don't want you to know is that refineries use a huge amount of electricity in refining gasoline. And that's usually not even figured into reports about gas cars' overall energy use.

oil car energy

Obviously the horse can still do things that the gas car can never do, and the gas car will always be able to do things the electric car can't do. But they have really different uses and advantages.

horse car different

I like to take folks back to the turn of the century when people said 'gas cars can never replace horses because you can feed horses at your house, you get along with them, they're nice.'

horse nice people

I'm sure the gasoline companies would love to keep their 100 percent monopoly on transportation fuel.

gasoline monopoly fuel

But a significant portion of this is accounted for by currency volatility, we believe the yields on offer for hard and local currency EM debt don't offset the credit risk that the underlying indices entail.

business

We don't believe that current low yields offer great value and expected returns are not sufficient to have a lot of bond investments as diversifying assets.

money